Operations Management: Sustainability and Supply Chain Management, Twelfth Edition

Summary

Quality is a term that means different things to different people. We define quality as “the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bears on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.” Defining quality expectations is critical to effective and efficient operations.

Quality requires building a total quality management (TQM) environment because quality cannot be inspected into a product. The chapter also addresses seven TQM concepts: continuous improvement, Six Sigma, employee empowerment, benchmarking, just-in-time, Taguchi concepts, and knowledge of TQM tools. The seven TQM tools introduced in this chapter are check sheets, scatter diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, Pareto charts, flowcharts, histograms, ...